When I began scribbling ideas for my investigation in week 7, I had an idea of what I wanted my final product to look like even though we were told many times that a final product was not necessarily encouraged or required.
Some things I told myself I wanted to improve on was my directing skills, audio+visual editing skills, cinematography, and also communication skills since I would be contacting strangers. I think I have somewhat improved in all these aspects, apart from sound editing which I will go into later.
From an ‘administrative’ point of view, it was difficult to schedule times with each participant, let alone reach out to them. I contacted three actors from starnow, and two of them responded positively to my project and were happy to help, although we were not able to meet up a second time to film more refine footage. The shootings went well, but one thing I should take note of is the clarity and assertiveness of my instructions. Sometimes I found myself unable to tell the participants to re-redo an action because I felt I didn’t have the right to since they were helping me out. Looking back I do regret that I was not directive enough.
With my cinematography, rather than saying I’ve improved, it would be more accurate to say that I’ve tried a lot of new things that I probably would not have done in the past. I tried heaps of different camera movement, exposure changes, focus pulling, zooming, to the point I would probably say I overcompensated for the lack of movement in everything else I’ve done at RMIT.
In terms of editing, the main thing I focussed on was visuals. To be honest, I completely ignored sound because I was too concerned with the images. I noticed this in week 11, and tried to make a soundscape for my frictional experiment but I was unhappy with it so I just deleted it. That’s how I came use my friend’s piano piece for ‘Vertovesque’.
From my first and failed attempt at editing montage up until now, I tried my hand at applying video effects several times. I dabbled in things like blurring, transitions, colour grading, and stabilising. Once, I tried applying a blur to the background of a video and it was the most frustrating, complicated, and time-consuming process ever. It legitimately took me 2 weeks to apply the video effect to a 7.5 second shot and the result was relatively subtle for something that, for me, took so much effort. It is highly likely that I didn’t in the smartest way though as I masked almost frame by frame. I learned out how to stabilise videos with the warp effect because my footage was too shaky so I guess that something good came out of that.
The works that are representative of my research are all unrefined, test shootings that I would have liked to developed on. Given the chance, I probably would in the future. The videos do feel unsubstantial to me, especially since they are meant to represent my investigation.
Research works:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/0B67RnNkkCddvNm9ycXowSDNoQ0U